iRiver P10 PMP: DMB, big touchscreen, but why the small HDD?

Having first seen the iRiver P10 PMP back at CES 2008, it’s been pretty much all-quiet on the news front regarding the slick touchscreen media player. Happily we’ve now got some more information, and while it’s perhaps more of a niche product than, say, the iPod Touch, that’s not to say it’s a slouch. Based on a heavily-disguised Windows CE core, the P10 has a 33GB hard-drive, 4-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen and optional DMB.

Grunt is courtesy of a RMI AU1250 CPU running at 600MHz, which should be plenty fast enough for a PMP. All that processing power means the P10 is happy with Flash, MPEG, WMA, XivD, MP3 and WAV formats. Plump for the P10 Pro and iRiver add a DMB digital TV tuner (likely only good for Korea, sadly) and an electronic dictionary.

If anything, the hard-drive seems a little small considering it’s a traditional platter-based 1.3-inch model rather than the flash storage you’d find on the iPod Touch. We expected the trade-off for the lesser shock-protection to be far increased capacity, but at 33GB that’s not exactly happened. iRiver are suggesting pricing of 328,000(KRW) ($318) for the standard P.ple P10 and 398,000(KRW) ($385) for P10 Pro.